What Is The Correct Use of Schema.Org Sitenavigationelement

schema.org: SiteNavigationElement with multiple elements

This is my original menu structure I came up with after reading all answers in the duplicate link

Except my answer, it seems ;-) As I explained in my answer to the possibly duplicate question, the url property should not be used for each navigation link. Instead, the url property should provide a URL for the whole navigation (which, typically, doesn’t exist).

The same goes for every other SiteNavigationElement property (as of Schema.org version 2.2), like name in your example: it’s for the name of the navigation (e.g., "Navigation"), not for the names of the navigation entries.

So using the SiteNavigationElement does not seem to be very useful. The same is the case with WebPageElement and its other sub-types. They may be useful in special cases and in non-HTML contexts, but generally I wouldn’t use them for typical Web pages.

Schema SiteNavigationElement as JSON-LD Structured Data

I would think that your SiteNavigationElements should be contained in ItemLists, or just included as separate items.

For example as part of a list:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context":"http://schema.org",
  "@type":"ItemList",
  "itemListElement":[
    {
      "@type":"SiteNavigationElement",
      "position":1,
      "name": "Home",
      "description": "Homes Desc.",
      "url":"http://www.example.com/"
    },
    {
      "@type":"SiteNavigationElement",
      "position":2,
      "name": "Tours",
      "description": "Tours desc.",
      "url":"http://www.example.com/tours/"
    },

    ...etc

  ]
}
</script>

However, just because you can do this does not mean you should. Check out this relevant answer.

I would think that your SiteNavigationElement URLs should be for the elements themselves on the current page (as opposed to the pages they link to), which usually do not exist.

Why would SiteNavigationElement have a schema attribute of material?

A Schema.org type can always have all properties of its parent types.

Not all properties necessarily make sense for all children types.

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For SiteNavigationElement, the parent type is WebPageElement, and its parent type is CreativeWork, and its parent type is Thing.

The material property is defined for CreativeWork (and Product). A CreativeWork can also be a physical work, for which it can make sense to specify the material. If you have a digital CreativeWork (like every SiteNavigationElement would be), simply ignore this property.

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